


unlikely places

by hydrochaeris



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Derek "Nursey" Nurse is Unchill, Getting Together, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, and talks about capital-A Art and capital-P poetry way too much, but this is a fic about math and science too don't worry, lots of friendships w various characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:27:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9100426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrochaeris/pseuds/hydrochaeris
Summary: “Is it really that pretentious to think about humanity’s significance in the eyes of the cosmos, and to want to put that smallness reflectively onto paper?”Lardo just stares at him. Okay, point taken.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i don't really like the beginning of this but i loved the middle and end too much not to post it. also, this is absolutely me being an english and math nerd and combining STEM w the arts because they are kept far too separate and it bugs tf out of me. this fic was almost named "the Standard for All Intellectualisms and High-Minded Thinking," so let that tell you what it will. this is unbeta'd, so please tell me if i made any mistakes!

He doesn’t have to be high to think about the composition of words. He thinks about unstructured fragmented perpendicularly angled lines and he does not think they will change for him. He’s tried to make something honest with these things time and time again and time after time it does not come.

He is high when he says to Lardo, “It’s like, you have to get everything right first. And then you can get everything wrong after that, to make it beautiful.”

Her face is very small and flat, only pointed at the chin and soft at the nose, and she looks at him small and flat too.

“Picasso.”

“Right, but with words. They don’t like it with words. They can—modern art, and everything, you know. That’s the way they all accept it.”

“They,” she says, teasing. “Who the fuck—”

“You know.” He gestures like it could encompass anything at all. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Technical details mastered at a young age. Cubism later.”

He fucking loves Lardo. She _gets it_.

“But like,” she says, “you’re talking about making something beautiful.”

“Chyeah.”

“So you’re not really—you’re talking about making something honest.”

“Always.”

“You don’t think the technical details can be beautiful?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. But that’s what’s required, it’s the formula to be beautiful. Or the formula to make sense and be beautiful. You know.”

She does know. He sees how she knows in the way she looks at the paint peeling on her bedroom wall and not at him. The paint is chipped like her fingernail polish, and he is not sober enough to make a metaphor about it.

“To art,” he says, and taps  the bowls of their pipes together like anything means anything at all.

-

Chowder sprawls on the couch, upside down, his hair dented by the floor. He’s not moving, but he’s not dead. Which is good. Chowder is always moving. Nursey thinks that he might always be moving, too, but he’s not sure. He knows that when he really tries to sit still he can’t. But when he’s not thinking about it, which is most of the time, then it’s like. Whatever. Whatever.

“I think code is like art,” Chowder says, and Nursey snorts.

“No way, man.”

“Yes way.”

“I’m too hungover for this.”

“So’m I. I’m just saying, I think it’s the same thing.”

“What, like you can program art with a code? Digital art’s cool shit.”

Chowder shakes his head. Nursey wonders if any of his hair will get stuck between floorboards and really hopes not. This was a better party when he was wasted and it wasn’t so bright outside. Actually, he thinks the party’s over now. He was super fucking smashed, so it’s not like he remembers it ending.

“I think that the code is the art. Like how languages are art.”

“Your fucking beep-boop computer shit is not art, man.”

“But you said art can be anything.” Chowder is frowning really hard, except it’s a smile because he’s upside down. Nursey realizes vaguely that he is on the floor, and there’s like, a blanket or something on him. It’s teal and covered in sharks.

“Chowder, did you put your Sharks blanket on me?”

“Stop avoiding the subject,” Chowder says. “Seriously. It’s so not ‘swawesome.”

Nursey’s first instinct is to say ‘ _You’re_ so not ‘swawesome,’ but he swallows it because a) it’s not true and b) he’s barely able to string together a sentence right now, so he’s definitely not up for a fight. Especially not with Chowder, who would fucking annihilate him. The man has no mercy.

“But there’s patterns,” Chowder continues. “And sometimes even stanzas—like poetry! Well, kind of. And different colors depending on what program you use. I think it’s art.”

“Okay, man.”

“You don’t believe me,” Chowder says. His voice gets that weird goalie edge to it. It’s not petulant, but it’s a little harsh. It’s kind of un-chilling Nursey’s whole hungover vibe.

He pulls the Sharks blanket a little tighter over himself and shrugs.

“I think you can define art however you want.”

“That’s not an answer,” Chowder says, but he drops it, finally.

-

Dex comes into the Haus when Nursey is reading _Wuthering Heights_. He doesn’t need to look up from the book to see Dex’s eyeroll.

“Isn’t using pink highlighter in that defacing a literary masterpiece?”

“Man, get your pie and get out, I’m trying to work here.”

“Wow, you’re not even gonna defend Brontë? Say that she was a victim of sexism and that her book transcended typical expectations of a novel of her time with like, multiple viewpoints of narrators and the subversion of the generic male hero trope?”

Dex’s tone is biting, but his words are kind of too accurate. Nursey slowly lowers the book from his face and gives Dex Unimpressed Stare #45, which is, quite frankly, much more of a masterpiece than _Wuthering Heights_ could ever hope to be. No offense, Emily.

“How much do you know about _Wuthering Heights_ exactly, Dexy?”

Dex still looks mad, but now there’s a pink flush crawling up his neck. Success.

“I don’t know anything about art, not according to _you_.”

“Okay, but that is exactly how I would’ve defended Brontë if I cared enough to do so, so like…?”

The blush is reaching Dex’s ears. It’s really fucking cute. Nursey swallows completely coincidentally right after realizing that.

“Maybe your arguments are too fucking predictable, then,” Dex says, and stomps off to the kitchen.

Nursey turns a page and sticks the highlighter back behind his ear. Huh.

-

Ransom comes to him later, frowning uncertainly.

“Hey man, you’re like a writer, right?”

Nursey resists the urge to say ‘I am a _poet_.’ He resists it for like, two seconds, anyway, and it’s the thought that counts.

“I am a _poet_.”

“Yeah, so you write,” Ransom says. “Point being—can you look over this essay for me? Just for grammar I guess, it’s no big deal if you don’t have the time, it’s just that Holtzy’s b—”

“Nah, nah, I gotchu,” he says, taking the laptop from him. “Oh, wait, this is open to—”

“Yeah, sorry, that’s my notes for a lab I’m doing. I’ll switch it.” Ransom taps a few keys and the Word doc comes up, but Nursey can’t quite get over the lab notes. They were in Excel, orderly little rectangles of information, the first row all yellow, the second row all green, the third row all orange. Nursey shakes himself a little bit. He is not finding fucking art in the notes of a bio lab. He’s not _that_ pretentious. Not really.

“Thanks, brah!” Ransom says, and leaves the room.

-

A few hours later, Nursey has read the entire essay multiple times, made his edits, and also realized how fucking good of a technical writer Ransom is. He would never in a million fucking years willingly take a course on comparative vertebrate physiology, but, should he do so anyway, he now understands at least part of it way more than he’d thought possible. The essay’s sentences are direct and simple and never try to cram more information into one breath than Nursey can take. He corrects the minimal grammatical errors and mumbles it under his breath a few times, too. Just to test its flow.

When Ransom comes back, Nursey hands him his laptop with a low whistle.

“That science shit’s real intense.”

Ransom shrugs. “I think this is my favorite unit so far, actually. But the paper’s good?”

“It’s ‘swawesome is what it is. I actually understood almost all of that.” He grins. “And I’ve always majorly sucked at science.”

“You probably just had shitty teachers,” Ransom says, and his tone makes Nursey feel like this is the beginning of a rant he’s said many times. Which he feels, but is not in the mood for right now.

“Okay, sure, man,” he says. “Anyway, you’re like, a mega-genius. Not just for understanding that shit, but for writing so I can understand it too.”

“Aw, bro.” Ransom punches him in the shoulder. “Means a lot, coming from the Standard for All Intellectualisms and High-Minded Thinking himself.”

He leaves with a smile, ignoring Nursey’s confused spluttering.

“Hey—wait—I’m not the—I’m not a _standard_ —what?!”

“You kind of are, though,” Lardo says, and okay when the fuck did she get here. What. The. Fuck.

“What the fuck,” he says, and Lardo shrugs.

“Yeah. You’re the most pretentious person here, anyway.”

“Is it really that pretentious to think about humanity’s significance in the eyes of the cosmos, and to want to put that smallness reflectively onto paper?”

Lardo just stares at him. Okay, point taken.

“All poetry is honest,” he says instead, and she quirks her mouth in a lopsided acknowledgement.

“I don’t think so, man.”

“All _my_ poetry is honest.”

She shrugs again. “I haven’t read enough of it to know that.” Lardo pauses. “A lot of my art is fake, but I don’t think that makes it less valued.”

Nursey sits bolt upright, ignoring the tension in his spine that tells him he’s been sitting on the bad couch for far too many hours on end in favor of pointing his finger directly at Lardo.

“ _You’re pretentious too!_ You think about this shit just as much as I do!”

She grins at that.

“Chill, Nurse. And yeah. But I don’t yell about it in the Haus at like, 7 in the fucking evening.”

“We are exactly the same,” Nursey says, his finger unwavering, “except that you don’t talk a lot and I do.”

“Sure.” She sits on the couch beside him and unlocks her phone, revealing a game of Candy Crush with five moves left. They sit in comfortable silence till Nursey leaves for his own dorm.

-

Chowder shows up at his dorm the next morning, a huge Tupperware full of cookies in both hands, his laptop and two textbooks on top of it.

“Bitty was trying out gluten-free recipes and he made way too many. You’re gonna take some, right?”

Nursey loves this team. He really does. “Of course, bro. Hey, come in for a sec?”

They end up back to back on Nursey’s bed, Chowder on his laptop doing homework, Nursey on his laptop rewatching old Brooklyn 99 episodes. The box of cookies sits against their sides, slowly being emptied between the two of them. There’s pumpkin, chocolate chip, snickerdoodles, lemon, peppermint, carrot, and rosemary. Because it’s Bitty baking them, they’re all amazing.

He puts his laptop away when he realizes he’s got ten minutes to get to his next class.

“Fuck. C, I gotta go to class now, we can get milkshakes later?”

“I’m lactose intolerant, but yeah!” Chowder smiles even though he doesn’t look up from his programming.

“That coding,” Nursey says hesitantly. He took multiple looks over his shoulder when they were back to back, and he thinks he’s made up his mind. “It’s so cool, man. It’s art.”

Chowder does look at him this time, his grin blinding. “You think so?”

“Chyeah.”

-

He’s arguing with Dex, obviously. Nursey’s so glad they’ve gotten past all the uncomfortable conversations about classism and racism; their arguments have become way more enjoyable. Still personal, though. Never not that.

“And you worry so fucking much about poetry all the time! Can you get your head out of a book so it doesn’t slam into a door next time?”

“There wasn’t that much blood. Chill.”

“You’re the one who fucking fainted and you tell _me_ to chill? You’re the one who’s obsessed with all these words and shit and you tell _me_ to chill? I have _so_ much chill compared to you. _So. Much. Chill_.” Dex’s entire face looks like a tomato, if tomatoes had freckles. Now that’s a good metaphor. It’s probably  because he’s outside, which is why the plant metaphor came to mind, because the air is ripe with—“And now you’re overanalyzing what I just said, or you’re overanalyzing _something_. Whatever. That’s your overanalyzing face.”

“I don’t have an overanalyzing face because I don’t overanalyze,” Nursey says, and does not stumble over using ‘overanalyze’ twice in one sentence. Because that would be very unchill. “You overanalyze everything, though, you always think of the worst case scenario as if it’s actually _likely_ —”

“Because I’m trying to be an engineer! That’s fucking different! And actually, the worst case scenario’s chances of happening increase exponentially when I’m around _you_!”

Well. That stings, just a bit.

“Okay, whatever,” he says. “I know I’m a walking disaster, rub it in—” The quad is a lovely place to walk at this time of year, so Nursey is going to walk over there now. It’s not related to anything at all whatsoever.

“Wait, don’t—fuck.” Dex catches the sleeve of his sweater a little tentatively. “Where are you going?”

“To take a refreshing walk with my book, like I was about to before you interrupted me.”

“You interrupted yourself by walking into the—okay, anyway,” Dex says, not really meeting Nursey’s eyes. “Why are you going out there? It’s all snowed over and everything is dead, and you’re in a sweater and jeans.”

“Why do you care? What do you want me to do?” He sneers, very effectively. “Analyze how the freezing atmosphere is making you act cold?”

Dex presses his lips together hard. “No. I want you to tell me about your poetry.”

“What?”

He’s so taken aback he trips over the edge of the sidewalk. Dex’s hands shoot out and grab his arms before, Nursey thinks, either of them really know what’s happening.

“What did you say?” he says again, and thinks that he understands the meaning of the word _befuddled_ for the first time in his life, and how it sounds exactly like what it is.

It’s hard to tell, because Dex is wearing a beanie and a coat with a high collar and his blush usually starts around his neck and ears, but he thinks Dex is going kind of pink in the face. It’s probably the cold.

“I dunno, you just, I guess you just seem like you really care about it, and, I dunno. I guess I only really get that you care about things when you yell about them in my face. It would be, uh, nice? If you just told me about them instead.”

Yeah, Dex is definitely avoiding his eyes, and Nursey may be good at repressing his own emotions, but he’s not a complete idiot.

“Okay, sure. Just warning you though, I lost a lot of blood just now, so if I’m not fully coherent that’s why.”

Dex rolls his eyes. They walk away from the Medicine and Health Center and back to the Haus together in silence. Chowder is already at the door, and offers them mugs of cocoa or cider.

“Hey guys! I was just heading out, the Women’s Volleyball Team is having a snowball fight and I was invited, but do you want anything to drink?”

“Cocoa,” Dex says in the same moment Nursey says “Cider.” Chowder hands them their respective mugs and runs off.

“I bet you he’s gonna do a split just to duck a snowball, and everyone’s gonna fall in love with him,” Nursey says. “He’s so extra.”

Dex takes a very judgmental sip of cocoa. “You’re one to talk.”

“Anyway, poetry,” Nursey says, settling into a hard-backed chair. It’s kind of surreal being in the kitchen when Bitty’s not there. “I think people get so caught up in how pretentious it can be that they don’t realize it’s about simple, honest things.”

Dex takes a slightly less judgmental sip and sits down next to him. “…Go on.”

“Because like, they think poetry is all about flowery figurative language, and metaphors about the moon and shit. And yeah, poetry can be really gaudy. But it’s meant to have layers—”

“Like an onion.”

“I am ignoring the fact that you interrupted me talking about poetry to reference Shrek and moving on,” Nursey says. He has to bite his lips a little to make sure he’s not smiling. “It’s not meant to be read at surface value. It’s meant to make you feel something, and that calls for the deconstruction of language.”

“The deconstruction of language,” Dex repeats quietly. He’s frowning a thoughtful, adorable frown. “What do you mean?”

“When we’re first learning English in school,” Nursey says, and yeah, he’s really getting into it now, “we’re learning about all the rules, because that’s what we need at that moment to get a good foundation for writing. But because we don’t know the rules yet, and we don’t know how language works yet, we actually can wield it as our best weapon then.”

“I’m ignoring that metaphor.”

“Children are all emotional peaks,” Nursey says, setting down his mug so he can gesture with his hands. “Everything they do is based on an emotion or a few, heightened to the fullest extent. There’s not a lot of room for nuance, but they understand all these emotions fully. And that’s what poetry is about—not understanding language, per se, not understanding the grammatical ins and outs of a sentence, but about using language to convey emotion in the simplest of ways.”

“Like, ‘I am happy’? Is that poetry?” Dex hooks his fingers in the handles of the mug, looking uncertain.

“No. That’s a simple sentence, but it still has structure. And the happiness isn’t strong enough. It needs to be the reaction to something,” Nursey says. “Something that evokes an emotion, not just an emotion for its own sake. Like the stuff we fight about.”

“Or the opposite of fighting,” Dex says, and sets his mug down. “Like this?”

He leans forward and kisses Nursey. It’s small and brief, within the still quiet of the kitchen, it’s an emotion that expands intensely from his ribs, that gathers in the folds of his hands where they’ve come to grasp Dex’s jaw on both sides. Nursey thinks about one of the graphs he saw, just for an instant, in Ransom’s lab notes, an exponential that rose and rose and didn’t stop. He understands that graph now—not the math behind it, or the science used to support it, but the feeling.

Nursey breaks the kiss to breathe, and knocks their foreheads together gently. Being gentle with Dex is new, but he’s been thinking about it for a long time, so he thinks it’ll be good.

“I am happy,” Dex says softly into the space under his ear. Nursey smiles and smiles.

-

It’s the start of spring when Nursey decides to invite some people to his poetry slam. Lardo, Chowder, Ransom (and Holster, as Ransom’s plus one), and Dex all sit together in the middle of the crowd—Nursey’s grateful they didn’t sit in the front, because he’s not sure he would’ve stopped making eye contact with Dex, and eye contact with Dex is risky when he’s trying to focus on his words.

The floorboards squeak as Nursey walks up to the mic, and he feels the weight of all those eyes on him at once. He thinks it’s a chill weight, like waking up under Chowder’s Sharks blanket, or like eating so many cookies you can feel them cradled in the pit of your stomach, satisfactory and full. Nursey knows exactly what he’s going to say, and he knows it’s different than usual—not because his friends are all watching him, but because he finally got it right. This will be honest. He didn’t change the words like he always thought he would. They changed him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> the seeds of this fic came from me being bitter about the non-usage of math and science in art, and also just a general ongoing discussion i have with myself about what art even fucking is. a lot of what i know about poetry was revealed to me in [this post](http://yeahbees.tumblr.com/post/153823522710/the-average-fourth-grader-is-a-better-poet-than), so shoutout to hannah gamble. and also shoutout to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhD6h7VuaI), which i played on repeat while writing most of this.  
> 
> 
>   
> [main](http://yeahbees.tumblr.com) || [omgcp sideblog](http://wholsomholsom.tumblr.com) || [reblog here](http://wholsomholsom.tumblr.com/post/155096996356/unlikely-places)  
> 


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